7PM - Jack (A 5PM Short Story)

by Chris Heinicke

  Heading to the entry door, I clenched my fists so tight, I felt like I could punch the building to the ground. I took a deep breath, then entered the building and made a direct route to the elevator. While waiting for the elevator, I wondered why this man was using the rooftop to stage something. He could have picked anywhere in the city. It was as if he knew I had a thing for heights. A little phobia I grew up with that the war couldn’t even take from me.

  The elevator vacant, I stepped in and pressed a button for the top floor. As usual, when my mind knows my body’s leaving the ground, it tingles as the floor beneath me takes me to a higher place, floor numbers ticking over as the lift rises. I closed my eyes, mentally trying to push out the dizziness and searching for the calmness before the storm that would soon erupt when I finally met this menace to the city’s women.

  The door opened, and I headed straight to the staircase to take me up to the roof. My thoughts shifted to Kathy, wondering if she’d been caught up in all this, and cursing myself if it was too late for her. I could never forgive myself if something happened to her after going against my better judgement. But my focus returned to finding an end to this killer’s little reign of terror on the vulnerable, and it would either be him or I who would meet their end on that night.

  Taking two steps at a time, I found myself upon the topmost surface of the building. The air silent and attempting to chill my bones, I swear I could have heard a pair of butterfly wings flap through the sky should one have passed.

  “Thanks for showing up, Mr Griffon,” a voice slithered through the silence.

  I turned to face the voice’s owner. His face hidden in shadow, the man held Kathy out in front of him with a knife held near her throat. The expression she wore displayed a horror I had never witnessed before.

  “Please, let her go, take me instead.” I said the words slowly, pointing at my chest when the last three words come out.

  “You’ve got a few inches height on me and at least thirty pounds of muscle. No thanks.”

  “So why get me to come up here, then?”

  “Because if you want to save your friend here, I need you to step over the edge of the roof. I don’t need the likes of you chasing me around the city like some sort of Batman wannabe. I’m here to deliver the women of this city from their evil ways, and I still have so much to do.”

  Peeking at my friend, the nerves set in. “How do I know you won’t kill her after I’m gone? What guarantee do I get she’ll be fine?”

  “There is no guarantee, but the promise that I’ll slit her throat right here in front of you if you don’t start moving now.”

  My thoughts dug deep inside me. So this is how it ends? I become a pile of crushed flesh and bone on a sidewalk with my last thought being of the uncertainty of the fate of a friend. Do I look at the bigger picture and make a dash for the killer, knowing I can end his terror by sacrificing Kathy?

  I looked in her eyes again. No, I would not deliberately allow her to be harmed. “Okay, I’ll do it. You win.”

  “I always win, Griffon. Now please pick up the pace.”

  “How do you know my name?” I asked and stopped in my tracks.

  He took a couple of steps forward, keeping Kathy the same distance ahead of him, still at knifepoint. Observing his face, this menace looked nothing as I expected. A young face, barely out of his teens at my best guess, framed with a dark hoodie. “I’m your biggest fan. I know all about your heroic deeds back in Afghanistan, and I wanted to be like you. But no, I couldn’t be. They said I’m not psychologically capable of serving on a military force.”

  “Can’t imagine why,” Kathy said.

  He ignored her. “So I needed to get your attention. I had to practice so I would know when it was time for your woman, I’d be ready. Turned out I quite enjoyed killing, so I did a few more, and more again after Melinda.”

  “And the raping was because that’s the only way you can get any action with the ladies? You sick, pathetic, loser,” I said to him.

  “Loser? You’re the one about to jump off this fucking building, and this city will still have no idea who I am.”

  It’s all the confirmation I needed to know he wouldn’t let Kathy live if I did jump. “You want to be like me? Then come on and jump with me. Kathy will tell the authorities that I’m the killer, and you died protecting her while taking me down. Come on, do it.”

  His eyes flinched.

  “Come on, this is your chance to be a hero.” I beat a fist against my chest.

  “But I’ll be dead,” he said. I took close note of his arms and sensed his grip on his hostage weakening. I couldn’t make a move yet, though. He could slit her throat in a lot less time than it would take me to rush him from several yards away.

  “You don’t have any other way out of this. On my way up here, I may or I may not have called the cops. Do you want to be standing here when they storm the rooftop?”

  “You’re bluffing.”

  I took a few steps, heading for the roof edge and taking in the night sky. An unusually clear night illuminated many more stars than usual. A beautiful spectacle in what could well have been my last night. My stomach tightened and my head began to spin as I stepped closer to the brink. I looked to the ground below, lit up from the artificial light from the few streetlights and infrequent traffic. I hated the crashing of limb-weakening waves washing all over me, the hopelessness of a phobia consuming my normally strong inner self.

  “Funny how you bluffed your superiors all those years when you flew out on missions. How did you manage to ignore your fear of heights as those chopper blades cut through the air and lifted you higher, and higher, and high…”

  “Shut up,” I yelled back at my antagonist.

  “You want it to stop? Just jump.”

  I put my toes over the edge of the concrete tower and closed my eyes. The moment had come. I smiled as I thought about the situation and realised I was to be reunited with my love in the next world. So it wouldn’t be a bad thing. In fact, I found myself wanting it all to end.

  “There has to be another world. We can’t go through all this crap that is life to eventually enter a darkened vacuum where not even your soul lives on,” I said out loud, spreading my arms and leaning my head back.

  “Maybe there is only the darkness. We’re about to find out…” the killer said.

  “Enough of this shit,” I heard Kathy’s voice and spun in an abrupt one-eighty degree twist in time to witness her lean back into the killer and propel him backwards into a concrete wall.

  I ran towards the pair of them, knowing the man still had a knife in his hand and would likely overpower Kathy and do his worst. As they crashed, I saw him lose his grip on the blade, and I got the feeling she gained the advantage over him as he squeezed his eyes shut. She jabbed an elbow into his stomach, and on her release from his grip, she turned to face him and kicked him in the ribs.

  “Keep hitting him,” I called out, just a few feet away. I needn’t have worried—she had already brought her right fist to his head, well above the short woman’s height.

  Crashing down, the killer looked beaten. It wasn’t about to stop there. I wouldn’t let him see the inside of a prison. Kathy stepped away as I leaned down and pulled the man up by his collar to drag him along the roof, the tips of his toes scraping the surface. Swinging his fists against my sides, the killer’s hits did nothing to free him from my grasp.

  The bite of the cold air intensified as we veered close to the edge, and at this point, he pleaded for his life. His words only bounced off me. When I decided on a course of action, I saw it to completion unless a superhero force prevented me. It was how my natural survival instincts worked, and it got me to the age I am now.

  “If you do this, you’re nothing but a killer. You’re no better than me, Griffon,” his body trembled as he spoke.

  I pulled him around, still holding him by the collar, his feet now dangling over the air separating him from the ground twenty-four stories belo
w. His full weight now only supported with my right arm, he tried to reach for the rooftop edge with his feet while, at the same time, hitting my arm with his own fists.

  “I had it all, and you took it away from me, you son of a bitch,” I yelled. I could hear additional sets of footsteps hitting the concrete. I chanced a quick peek and saw two police officers.

  “Jack Griffon, you need to release him,” one of them called out.

  I recognised the face. “Ed, keep out of this. I’m doing the city a favour.”

  “It’s not your job to hand out justice. Bring him back over from the edge, and you can walk away from this.”

  I turned back to the killer. “They want me to spare your life. Someone in this city actually wants you to see tomorrow. But Melinda won’t see tomorrow, and maybe I won’t either. But one thing’s for sure,” he screamed as I released him, “you won’t.”

  It was just like they showed it in the movies when someone fell from a great height. Arms and legs spun everywhere as if the action would grant them the sudden ability to fly, and his body slowly shrank and disappeared from my view. I smiled and turned to face the arresting officers. I didn’t care if they opened fire and ended my life right there and then. I achieved my mission—I avenged the murder of the most beautiful person I had ever known. I smiled at the two cops, my last action before the electric darts fired from the men’s Tasers hit me, causing me to fall and shake on the ground before the world went dark.

  Chapter 4

  I woke up on a bed in a windowless room, wearing only my cotton boxer shorts. I had no recall of any events occurring between the electric currents passing through my body and the confusion circling through my mind on my first morning spent at the strangest place I would ever know. Getting straight on my feet, I looked through every square foot of the strange room before spotting the camera pointing directly at the bed from the opposite corner of the room.

  “So, I’m being watched,” I said aloud, and with that being the case, I expected someone to enter the room at any minute. My mind jumped back to my neighbour Kathy, wondering what her opinion of me became after sending that man to his death from the top of an apartment building. She showed her own survival techniques in escaping the grasp of the man who held her as leverage to get me to kill myself, and I wondered how he managed to keep her prisoner for as long as he did.

  I would have tried the door myself, but I already knew the steel plated structure would be locked. I speculated if I had been taken to some weird off the grid type prison.

  A metallic-sounding click disrupted my thoughts as a key unlocked the door, and I saw two familiar faces—Ed and Kathy standing side by side and smiling at me. Unlike previous encounters, Ed wore civilian clothing and Kathy in a tight fitting crop top and pants that finished just past her knees. I had never noticed how well-endowed she was up top, and I soon cursed myself for thinking that way about her. I opened my mouth.

  “You probably have a hundred questions, and I will answer them in due course,” Ed said.

  “And I’ll answer one for you first,” Kathy said. Putting her hands in her hair, I nearly fall over as her mass of dark hair left her closely shaved head. I’m not usually a fan of a bald scalp on women, but it gave Kathy a femme fatale type of look. “Sorry, Jack, but I used you to get close to that killer.”

  Then Ed spoke. “I made the observation of the personal touch he had made when he killed Melinda. In every other case, the victims were found in alleyways and other impersonal dark areas in the city. But your woman was murdered in the bed she shared with you, so from that moment on, I knew it was only a matter of time before he would draw you out somehow or vice versa.”

  “But he could have killed me when he had the jump on me that night,” I said. The news of being used as bait threatened to make my blood boil.

  “Sorry about that, but hey, you’re still here.” Ed flashed a toothpaste commercial smile at me.

  “I had your back most of the time, but I couldn’t when you snuck out in the early hours of the mornings,” Kathy said. “I owe you an introduction at the very least. My real name is Hayley Jenkins, and I’m Ed’s stepsister. We work together, based from this compound you now find yourself on. But my specialty is demonstrating the—”

  “You’re just as bad as he is. You lied to me all this time, and I thought you genuinely cared. And can someone please tell me where the hell I am?” My temper rose by the second.

  The pair of them looked at each other, and Ed spoke first. “You’ve been recruited by the Praying Mantassassin Agency. We are hired to take out targets as requested by our clients, normally after a sexual encounter. We need someone like you to fill a position, and from what we’ve seen of you, you’re the only man for the job.”

  “You want me to fuck and kill people? I don’t think so. I want to go back home,” I said.

  “You can’t. You’re wanted for murder in the city of New York,” Ed said. “It wouldn’t take the police long to find you.”

  I rushed towards him, the draw of a pistol from the back of his jeans stopping me in my tracks. “Don’t push me, Griffon. As much as I like you and see your potential, I will shoot you in the face if I think I need to save my skin.”

  I stared into his eyes. As pissed off and empty as I felt, my newfound curiosity gave me a new reason to live. I didn’t want to die right then, despite what I had felt the night before. Something always kept me going, a hope of a brighter future somewhere one day burnt like a candle inside my heart.

  “Jack, please listen to what we have to offer. You don’t have to kill anyone. We want you to train recruits in the ways of fighting, weapon usage, and fitness. We want you as our new drill sergeant.” Kathy smiled. She walked right up to me, stopping an inch from my chest. I couldn’t deny she had great looks and a killer body, or should I say the body of a killer.

  Ed took a step closer to me. “It’s not nice how I got you into this, but you’ll love it. Money, pussy and power—it’s all yours for the taking here. Let’s go take a walk.”

  He opened the door to the room, and the sunlight smacked me in the face like a length of timber as I stepped towards the opening. He and Kathy guided me in the direction of where I needed to travel along the cement path, and I noticed several large buildings along the way to our destination.

  “Before anything, you need to clean up. A shower, shave, and a change of clothes, just to get you started,” Kathy said.

  “Just try and work with us, and if you don’t love being here at the end of a week, you can go back home. You’re a good man with great skills, and I think you will fit right in,” Ed added.

  We reached a large concrete building with a few high positioned windows, barely big enough for someone to stick their head out of. His fingers grasping the door knob and giving it a slow turn, Ed smiled and winked at me before giving the door a robust push and holding it open for me to walk in ahead of him.

  “I think I’m in the wrong shower block,” I said as I saw six totally naked females standing in a line under several showerheads against a white tiled wall. I shouldn’t have been looking at them. Turning away, I looked at Kathy and Ed.

  “Jack, it’s okay. We’re not a hippie commune, but we’re free with our bodies here, and in no time at all, you won’t even notice the nudity,” Kathy said. She grabbed hold of my hand. “There are exceptions for when women are having that time of the month to shower in a private cubicle.”

  I noticed the open shower stall at the other end of the room. Kathy guided me along behind her to another tiled wall parallel to the one with the showerheads. Attached to the wall was a wooden shelf, placed in such a position for placing clothes and supporting towel railings beneath it. The showering women looked in my direction, and a blonde woman with a physique not unlike a fitness trainer smiled at me as she lathered soap over her body.

  I turned away from her and looked back in the direction of Kathy standing before me wearing just a smile. I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I nev
er planned to see her this way. I couldn’t deny the sight of her nude form ignited illicit thoughts

  “It’s okay, Jack. I want you to look at me. I want you to do those things to me that are racing through your head right now.” She bent down and pulled my boxers to my ankles in a single motion. As she stood, she walked to an unused shower and pulled me along with her.

  I blocked out everyone else as Kathy lathered soap in her hands, proceeding to every inch of my body apart from my most private areas, which weren’t so private anymore in a room occupied by mostly naked people. Her fingers massaged as they worked their magic while cleaning me, momentarily freeing my mind from everything else in the world. She passed me the soap so I could return the favour, her soft skin like silk on my hands. She guided my hands to her generous sized breasts, my hands running over in an almost feather light touch as I washed them—possibly dozens of times more than necessary. Her nipples hardened between my fingertips as I stood behind her with my erection poking her in the back. She backed into me and pulled my hands down between her legs, parting them. My fingers explored the area as she grabbed the seeking hand and guided my finger to the exact spot to rub for maximum enjoyment.

  Kathy moaned, spinning herself around and washing me in those areas she had purposely skipped earlier. Her tender digits enriched my stiffness as she intensified her actions with lathering soap in hand. Just when I thought she couldn’t excite me further, she pressed herself against me and lathered my ass. Without warning, a small finger entered me and began to rub me in a place never touched before.

  “Hey,” I stepped away from her, not knowing if I may have actually enjoyed her uninvited intrusion in that split second before her finger was forcibly removed.

  “Guess you’re not used to that. I’m sorry.”

  I noticed there were still two females remaining, and a naked Ed in the shower next to us. They stared for a second until I turned away and grabbed Kathy by the hips and pushed her up against the wall. My arms held her in a stable position beneath her upper thighs as I penetrated her craving pussy.